The Scale That Lied, the Cat Who Voted, and the Thursday Night Run

This morning’s round-up has three fresh Reddit relationship stories: a bathroom scale that lied to a new mother, a cat whose family had to decide who he belonged to, and a running club that turned into a negotiation. These are anonymous posters’ accounts, paraphrased to protect identifying details, and a Reddit post is one person’s version of events rather than independent proof of every claim.

A man posting in r/tifu says his partner gave birth to their son about five months ago, put on some weight during the pregnancy, and had been feeling good about losing it. At his sister’s birthday last weekend, she announced proudly that she was down to about seventy-six kilos. 1

The poster says he already knew the number could not be right, because he had watched her weigh herself a week earlier at around eighty-eight kilos. He told her she was off by around ten, and argued that twelve kilos in a week is not physically possible.

Two days later, while the two of them were cooking dinner, she called him into the bathroom and pointed proudly at the display: seventy-seven kilos. According to his account, he went looking for an explanation instead of simply being happy for her, and then noticed that the scale was not sitting flat — one corner was slightly raised off the floor. He stepped on it himself and found he had apparently lost ten kilos. He flipped the scale over, removed dirt trapped under one of its feet, cleaned it, and weighed himself again: the ten kilos were back. When his partner stepped on, the scale read eighty-nine kilos.

The poster does not pretend this went well. He says he was right and that it did not feel good, that he wanted to close an argument from the weekend, and that he should have delivered the news more gently. He says her response was along the lines of “you could have let me live in my delusion a little longer.” His own closing advice to other people is to be happy for a partner who is proud of something, and to fix a broken scale without making it a verdict. The visible comments came down hard on him for how he handled it, while several readers also noted that a twelve-kilo loss in a single week would be a reason to see a doctor.

The second story is a r/BestofRedditorUpdates compilation that re-surfaced this week. The original post and its update are both from 2017, so the timeline matters: nothing in it is new except the compilation itself. 2

The poster was twenty-one at the time. Her sister, twenty-eight, has a bipolar diagnosis that the poster says the family had been working around for about eleven years, and she moved out at sixteen into a house their parents bought about six hours away. Nine years before the post, the sister got a cat. Two years before it, she decided to travel around Thailand and Australia and left him in a cattery, telling her parents to pick him up or he would go to a shelter because she could not keep paying to board him. The parents collected him. The poster says the family fell in love with him — a cat she describes as not especially cuddly, and whose company apparently ended her cat allergies.

She posted because her sister was coming home and the family wanted to ask to keep the cat. In the update she wrote three weeks later, the sister and her boyfriend stayed for a week while the parents paid to repair the boyfriend’s car. According to the poster, her sister walked in, picked up the cat and called him her baby — and the cat scratched her. There was an argument, the poster calmed her down, and on the last day of the visit her sister left the cat behind. The poster’s summary of how it ended was that she could now officially say the cat was hers, and she also says her sister handled the decision maturely.

The third post, from r/dating_advice, went up overnight. A twenty-eight-year-old man says he met a twenty-seven-year-old woman at a local run club, where both of them had been regulars before they started talking, and that they have been on five dates since. 3

He says she told him she really likes where things are going and asked him to switch to one of the club’s other weekly runs instead of the Thursday one they both attend. Her stated reason is that if they ever stop seeing each other, she does not want the club to become awkward or to feel like she lost her social circle. He says he has been attending that Thursday group for almost a year, knows people there, and that Thursday is the night that fits his schedule — and that she was the one who first approached him and asked for his number.

The visible replies leaned toward calling the request unreasonable and suggested he keep his night and let her decide how to handle it, but the comments are audience reactions rather than instructions he has to follow. He has not described any outcome, and the post asks for advice rather than reporting a decision.

The first post is about being right when being right is not the point. The second is about who an animal belongs to, decided in the end by the animal. The third is about a request that only works if one person quietly absorbs the cost.

The thing all three share is certainty: in each one, somebody was confident about what another person should do. Sometimes that confidence was backed by evidence, and sometimes it was just a preference wearing a rule. Either way, the morning keeps pointing at the same small question — whether the point is to have the conversation, or to win it.

That’s all for today’s Reddit Relationship Gossip. Keep your group chat open, and I’ll see you tomorrow.